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Sunday, December 23, 2012

A Sacred or Secular Christmas?

Credit: www.apenotmonkey.com

Merry Christmasof Love, Compassion, Kindness,Forgiveness, Fellowship, and Service to Others

“If it’s December, then it must be time to choose sides in the Christmas wars.” Thus begins writer Amy Sullivan in a USA Today article
titled “Let’s put ‘Christmas’ in its place.”1 Amy goes on to talk
about how “One camp worries that the celebration of Christ’s birth has
become too commercial and frantic. Its goal is a simple Christmas
season, stripped of consumption and flashing lights and endless holiday
parties.” Others “want shoppers to encounter more nativity scenes and
fewer ‘Happy holidays’ banners.”1 And then, on the opposite side of the
fence, there are those who want all vestiges of religion stripped from
the Christmas season and holiday, focusing only on the secular side of
the season. A good example of the latter is the recent battle in Santa
Monica, California, over a “60-year-old Nativity display in Santa
Monica’s Palisades Park.”2 For almost 60 years, a coalition of churches
have put on a life-size, 14-booth Nativity display in the park. But in
2009, a local atheist, Damon Vix, applied for and was granted a booth
alongside the Nativity display. In his booth Vix hung a sign quoting
Thomas Jefferson that read, “Religions are all alike—founded on fables
and mythologies,” and another sign that read, “Happy Solstice.” Now
there is a battle over whether the Nativity scene will be permitted or
not.

And so, there you have it: the battle between the sacred and secular
Christmas. On the one side you have those who cite “Jesus is the reason
for the season” and want Christmas to be a wholly religious observance
with only Nativities and none of the other Christmas decorations or
Christmas customs that have become such an integral part of our
Christmas observances. For these, the only proper greeting during the
month of December is “Merry Christmas.” On the other side you have
those who focus only on Santa Claus and merry making and prefer the
non-religious “Happy Holidays” greeting, what conservative commentator
Cal Thomas refers to as the “war on Christmas” that has been going on
since the time of King Herod.3

But when you stop to think about it, most Christmas customs and family activities are secular in nature. For instance, the most popular Christmas movies are for the most part secular: It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, A Christmas Story, and Miracle on 34th Street. None
of them are religious per se. And the most popular Christmas songs are
secular as well: According to the American Society of Composers,
Authors and Publishers, these are the Top 10 most-performed “Holiday”
songs for the first five years of the 21st Century:

The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire) – Mel Tormé, Robert Wells

You may have noticed that not one of the top nine is the least bit religious in nature. Furthermore, many non-Christians the world over now celebrate Christmas, but void of any real religious beliefs or significance.

And so, any way you look at it, Christmas is a mixed bag. What do we
do with this mixed bag? How do we decide between the sacred or secular
Christmas? Are we to choose one and reject the other? If no, how do
we find a balance between the two? As Amy Sullivan notes in that USA Today article,
“as a Christian who wants to focus on the spiritual rhythms of Advent
and truly commemorate God’s gift of his son to the world, I find that
the Christmas season gets in the way.”1

One of the issues with choosing between a purely sacred or purely secular Christmas is such a thing has never been.
As Sullivan notes, “The difficulty for those who understandably want to
simplify Christmas or strip the holiday of its secular element is that a
purely spiritual Christmas has never existed.”1 Sullivan notes that
“early Christians established Christmas by linking it to pre-existing
midwinter celebrations. Many northern cultures coped with winter by
looking forward to feasts and merriment marked by lights and greenery
that reminded them that the darkness would end and life would begin
again.”1 December 25th was selected to celebrate the birth
of Jesus in order to coincide with the winter solstice and the Roman
celebration of Saturnalia. Most of our Christmas decorations (Christmas
trees, the Yule log, holly, mistletoe, and the like) are adaptations of
ancient pagan customs. Christmas parties harken back to ancient Roman
times and reveling during the darkest winter days as a way to help them
cope with the dark, winter days and give them hope that the darkness
would eventually end and light would return.

But just as many of our “sacred” Christmas practices have their basis
in older, pagan or secular practices, some of our secular Christmas
customs have their basis in sacred history or myth. For instance, our
secular practice of gift giving can be traced to the gifts the Wise Men
are said to have given the baby Jesus. And Santa Claus grew in part
from the fourth century church leader, St. Nicolas, who was known for
giving to the poor.

Well, could it be that secular is not necessarily a bad thing?
Could it be that it is okay to find joy in celebrating both the sacred
and secular aspects of this Advent-Christmas season? The truth is,
Christmas has never, ever been totally sacred. Christmas has always
been blended with the secular. But something doesn’t have to be
religious in nature for the sacred to be present. Cannot the sacred
show up and be present in the secular? Is that not what the incarnation
means—Emmanuel, God with us in our everyday, secular lives? The
message and good news of Jesus—love, compassion, forgiveness,
justice—can permeate all aspects of life, if we let it. Jesus’ birth
brings hope for a better world. The spirit of Christmas prods us to be
better persons than we are the other eleven months, leading us to give
more to charity, be kinder to strangers, and more willing to get along
with others, such as those cousins with whom we have nothing in common
ideologically, politically, or religiously. Such can be done in secular
settings as well as sacred. And secular events can be used to build
family bonds. For instance, going to the Christmas parade, or to a
Nutcracker production can be a joyful, family-bonding event.

A story might illustrate the point. Several years ago, when we were
struggling to get a new church off the ground, as the organizing pastor I
worked for a Task Force consisting of six persons—three ministers and
three elders, or lay leaders, from different congregations. When
Christmas time rolled around, I printed some song booklets of Christmas
carols and songs that we used for a sing time, like we do at our 8
o’clock service. All but a couple of songs in the booklet were
religious in nature. But one of the children of the small, fledgling
congregation requested that we include “Jingle Bells.” So I did. And
you can bet that every Sunday during the Christmas season sing-a-long
one of the kids would shout, “Let’s sing ‘Jingle Bells.’” Well, when it
came time for our quarterly meeting with the Task Force to whom I
answered, someone let it slip that we included “Jingle Bells” in our
Sunday sing-a-long. And my chief supervisor said, “’Jingle Bells’!
Why, I’ve never heard of ‘Jingle Bells’ being sung in church before!”
Maybe not. But in that instance a secular song served a sacred purpose
of making the children of the congregation feel a part.

So, the question is, Should we be forced to decide between a wholly sacred or wholly secular Christmas? I
don’t think so. It really has never been either one or the other.
Sacred stories and secular practices have cross pollinated one another
for millennia, even since the time of Abraham and Moses. A very
poignant “Family Circus” cartoon appeared this week that speaks well to
the point of how the sacred and secular have blended. The father is
reading to the little girl, and the little girl asks, “Did Santa Claus
and Jesus go to school together?”4 Many of the religious practices that
found their way into Jewish practice and worship were borrowed (or as
my seminary Old Testament professor used to say, “baptized”) from pagan
practices. And many early Christian practices were borrowed and
baptized from pagan use as well. Amy Sullivan concludes her USA Today article
by saying, “As a society, we need a designated time of the year to
celebrate with one another. We need the outlet of X-mas to give us a
burst of festive energy to get through the winter. And we need fudge
and Santa cookies, darn it.”1

So perhaps the criteria we should use in deciding the Christmas
practices we embrace should be the motive or purpose which leads us to
embrace them and the positive results that flow from them. Or to put it
another way, do our Christmas customs and practices foster greater
love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, fellowship, and service to
others? Sacred and secular Christmas traditions—they have overlapped
from the very beginning. So why can’t we celebrate both, as long as we
do so in the true Christmas spirit? Amen.

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